Wednesday, 10 February 2016

Occasionally
a band will find itself in a situation where its members must
compromise if they are to achieve their creative vision. By way of
example, when the California alternative rock group - Camper
Van Beethoven – reconvened, nine years after an acrimonious
split, they recorded a song-for-song cover version of the Fleetwood
Mac album Tusk, as
a test to see if they could still work together.

Similarly,
when veteran members of Anal Cunt decided, at 3 o'clock one morning
in 1997, to form a black metal band, they were faced with the uphill
challenge of realising their dream while not waking up somebody who
was sleeping nearby.

To
quell the volume, the drums and electric guitars, which would have
traditionally formed the backbone of such a combo, were dispensed
with in favour of gentler acoustic instrumentation. Percussion was
generated by the vocalist, Seth Putnam, frenziedly slapping his palms
against his knees and a mattress.

Commentators
on YouTube, where Impaled Northern Moonforest's meagre canon of songs
now languishes (mostly unheard, and apparently unwanted by any record
label) have noted that the irregular drumming patterns bear a strong
sonic resemblance to a frenetic act of unfettered masturbation.

These
comparisons are probably fanciful. Putman - a
man who, shortly before his death from heart failure, at the age of
43 - was photographed standing stark-naked, with a syringe dangling
from one arm, while in the act of being orally pleasured by his wife,
would certainly have had no qualms about listing his penis as an
instrument had it been used as such.

Impaled
Northern Moonforest's attempt to parody black metal was further
hampered by Putnam's limited knowledge of the genre. By his own
admission he didn't really listen to black metal and regarded any
band playing this style of music who had formed after the mid-1980s
(about 99% of all black metal bands) as poseurs. He appeared to mock
his ignorance of the genre in a song recorded by Anal Cunt a few
years earlier: Living
Colour Is My Favourite Black Metal Band
deliberately confused the African American rock band Living Colour,
with the output of a fringe element of corpse-painted, mostly
Scandinavian metal bands, whose lyrics often explored Satanism and
pagan folklore.

The
music that emerged from Impaled Northern Moonforest's debut 3am rehearsal session was a rapid-tempo strain of Eastern European / hillbilly
folk, with garbled vocals reminiscent of the demonically-possessed 12
year old girl from The
Exorcist.
Abrupt shifts in tempo are commonplace. In line with the attention deficit
disorder that determined the duration of much of Anal Cunt's repertoire, the songs
are short, ranging from 20 seconds (Entranced
By The Northern Impaled Necrowizard's Blasphemous Incantation Amidst
The Agonizing Abomination Of The Lusting Necrocorpse)
to the relatively lengthy (and, in my opinion, overlong) one minute
and 28 seconds of Nocturnal
Cauldrons Aflame Amidst The Northern Hellwitch's Perpetual Blasphemy.

The
self-imposed limitations governing the choice of instruments, and a
lack of familiarity with the genre, were not the only difficulties
faced by the band. After recording their 13 song demo, Putman mislaid
the hastily-conceived cover art which contained the only record of
the track-listing, and so was forced to come up with new song titles.
Since a few of the demos had already been mailed out with the
original covers, a request was made on the band's website
for anybody who possessed a copy of the album to get in touch.

A further error of judgment was Impaled
Northern Moonforest's decision to forgo a contemporary model of
marketing and distributing their music, choosing instead a release
schedule that was governed by the whims of a powerful necrowizard.
This practice resulted in an indefinite delay in the release of the
band's only 7 inch single – Return
of the Necrowizard. It
was this postponement that arguably stymied
their commercial growth and rise to mainstream popularity.

One
thing that is immediately noticeable during a cursory first listen of Impaled
Northern Moonforest's recorded output is how quickly their sound
develops and matures. There is a marked stylistic shift between demo
one (recorded in March 1997) and demo two (recorded in September
1997) as the band grow in confidence and ambition. This upward trend
continues during the first 10 or so seconds of their belated comeback
single Return Of The Necrowizard, which momentarily rises to a
level of quality that one might honestly describe as “quite good”
while also maintaining a straight face.

Demo
one opener - the atmospheric Grim And Frostbitten Moongoats Of
The North – begins with somebody (presumably Josh Martin)
imitating a frozen arctic wind while, in the background, Putman rasps
and gargles like an angry caged demon with Tourette Syndrome. With
the grim and frostbitten stage set, there is a sudden eruption of
fast-paced, off-kilter, out of tune strumming, garnished by the
aforementioned rapid-fire knee-slapping percussion, as the song
accelerates towards its rickety, trembling climax.

Moongoats
functions best as an aperitif and scene-setter to its more varied
sequel - Forlorned Invocations Of Blasphemous Congregations Of
Lusting Goat Sodomizing Satanists. This is, in my opinion is one
of the better Impaled Northern Moonforest compositions, comprising a
55 second acoustic black metal rock opera. It begins with what could
be interpreted, by somebody who has never heard any Latvian folk
music, as a Latvian folk song, played on an acoustic guitar at
roughly three times the normal speed, and accompanied by Putnam's
indecipherable satanic ravings. At 27 seconds there is an abrupt
transition as the guitar affects the kind of plodding strum that
characterises the late Nirvana frontman – Kurt Cobain's - acoustic
home demos, before the tone once again shifts to a fast-paced
bluegrass clog dance. In many ways the song represents the black
metal of equivalent of The Beach Boys' Surf's Up or Queen's
Bohemian Rhapsody.

The
scampering up-and-down the scales, and the choppy tempo changes that
characterise the demo are supplemented in the coda - Transfixing
The Forbidden Blasphemous Incantation Of The Conjuring Wintergoat –
by chiming horror-movie keyboards - a random succession of
sustained glacial notes before the inevitable explosion of frenzied
banjo thrash joins the thrilling melee and the song assumes the
dimensions of something that might have once graced the stage of The Fast
Show's Jazz club.

Six
months later, Impaled Northern Moonforest reconvened to record their
second demo. Never one to rest upon his laurels, Putman's
thigh-slapping percussion had improved markedly, scaling new levels
of complexity. Whether his growth as a musician was brought about
through iron will and dedicated practice, or was the result of a
meeting with the devil itself, at a grim and frostbitten crossroads,
I cannot, or will not, say. The complicated hand-to-knee-patter that
opens Lustfully Worshipping The Inverted Moongoat While Skiing
Down The Inverted Necromountain Of Necrodeathmortum and it's
successor, Awaiting The Frozen Blasphemy Of The Necroyeti's
Lusting Necrobation Upon The Altar Of Voxrfszzzisnzf represents,I think, a special and extraordinary feat of rhythmic mastery.

Add to the off-kilter percussion, the atonal guitar strum and the
sustained discordant keyboards and you have conjured a sound that very accurately predicts the direction of late period Radiohead, in particular the
Oxfordshire band's recent attempt at recording a song for the Bond
movie - Spectre. I am not saying outright that Radiohead
ripped off Impaled Northern Moon because I don't want to be sued by
Thom Yorke. However there are similarities and a case could be
argued that the musical landscapes evoked by the nascent black metal
band lie at the root of Radiohead's reinvention and the grandiose
orchestral concoctions that they periodically record in stately homes
up and down the UK.

The
second demo also marked a broadening of lyrical themes, with an
interest in winter sports evident in Masturbating On The Unholy
Inverted Tracks Of The Grim & Frostbitten Necrobobsledders – a
song where randomly depressed sections of a keyboard give way to
random jabs of noise as the band set sail on the choppy waters of acoustic black jazz metal.

Fittingly
the band's finale - a 7 inch single titled Return
Of The Necrowizard
represents the high point of their creativity. A loop consisting of a
deep guitar strum, followed by some delicate finger-picking, is
accompanied by robust beat-boxing, thumped out on a mattress. I find
it extraordinary in this age of drum machines and samplers that such
rhythmic perfection can be achieved using live instruments. Even Putnam can't maintain it for very long. The considered beat quickly degenerates to a rapid patter before the song
regresses to the tried and tested pattern of insane hill-billy
bluegrass and mostly incoherent ranting.

An accompanying animated video depicts the levitating Necrowizard raining down fire and destruction upon an Eskimo village,
melting igloos and reducing the inhabitants to red wet stains in the grim and frostbitten snow.

Unfortunately
the band never ventured past the demo stage of recording. Putnam,
when asked, said: "I
can't imagine anyone wanting to hear a full length I.N.M. record, or
I can't imagine us wanting to record that much. Anything's possible
though.”

On
the Impaled Northern Moonforest website (which endures despite
missing the content of its downloads page and its community forums)
there remain tantalizing hints of some unreleased material: “Seth
has written a song title that contains about 10 variants of the word
"Abazagorath" (such as Abazagoration, Abazagorizing etc.)
and will give it to me for the site when he finds it.”

With
the not entirely unexpected death of Putnam in 2011, it would appear
that this song and others like it have been lost to the ages.

He is in hell now, playing in a thrash zydeco band with Satan, Adolf Hitler
and Saddam Hussein.